insects: May 2010 Archives

Natalie Angier has a fantastic/disgusting story in the New York Times this week on artists who specialize in organic materials for their work. Organic as in cockroaches, their own blood and discarded KFC bones. Tracy Heneberger, for example, used 1,555 sardines and covered them in shellac for one of his sculptures. And not just any sardines in a can that you pick up at Big Y. He needed the eyes still in their sockets, as well as a specific length and width, so he had to get them from a special dealer in Chinatown.

As for the cockroach artist, Fabian Pena:

Mr. Peña likes the medium of cockroach aesthetically, the way he can use the different tones in the wings as his palette to convey light and shadow. He likes it metaphorically, how we are disgusted by something with which we have so much in common -- the same taste in foods, the same easy adaptability to every possible niche.